Rhode Island's Two Unheralded Suffragists by Russell J. Desimone

Rhode Island’s Two Unheralded Suffragists By Russell J. DeSimone [banner image] – Left to right: Ingeborg Kindstedt, Maria Kindberg and Sara Bard Field. The centenary of the 1920 ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (the so-called Susan B. Anthony amendment) is fast approaching and as such there is renewed interest in the history of the woman suffrage movement. Rhode Island has had its share of female leaders in this cause. The first wave of suffragists included such notables as Elizabeth Buffum Chace, Paulina Wright Davis and Julia Ward Howe. As the woman suffrage movement took a full seven decades before it reached its goal, its understandable that a second wave of suffragists would be needed to come to the fore and replace the first-generation leaders that were silenced by advanced age or death. Counted among this new wave of women were Lillie Chace Wyman, Maude Howe Elliot, Alva Vanderbilt Belmont and Sara Algeo. However, two unheralded women suffragists living in Rhode Island need to be considered as worthy of inclusion in this second-generation of reformers. These two women, Maria Kindberg and Ingeborg Kinstedt, were recent immigrants to America and yet they would play a significant role in one of the most publicized events in the suffrage movement of the 20th century. Maria Albertina Kindberg was born in Ryd near the town of Skövde, Sweden on October 12, 1860 and arrived in the United States on June 25, 1889, and Maria Ingeborg Kindstedt was born in Glava near the town of Karlstad, Sweden on April 8, 1865 and arrived in the United States in October 1890. [1] Since these two towns are nearly one hundred miles apart, it is unlikely that the two women knew one another before arriving in America. It is also unclear how they met or 1 where they lived until 1895 when their names first appear in the Providence Directory. They appear living together at 311 Blackstone Street in the South Providence section of the capitol city. At that time South Providence was home to numerous immigrant groups including an enclave of Swedes with a Swedish church conveniently located nearby. Maria was listed as a midwife while Ingeborg appeared as a lecturer and soon, they were advertising a Swedish Home for Young Women as well as an employment agency (figure 1). Figure 1. Ad from 1897 Providence Business Directory. The woman suffrage movement in the United States had always been fractured by factions and rival organizations. The first great split occurred in 1869 when the Fifteenth Amendment, which granted African American men the right to vote, was first proposed. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton wanted the amendment to include women while other suffragists led by Lucy Stone, her husband Henry Blackwell, Rhode Island summer resident Julia Ward Howe and others, supported passage of the amendment as framed. The Anthony-Stanton led group thus formed the National Woman Suffrage Association opposing passage of the amendment while those favoring passage formed the American Woman Suffrage Association. It would not be until 1890 that these two rival organizations reconciled and merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). The Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association (RIWSA) was formed in 1868 under the leadership of Paulina Wright Davis and Elizabeth Buffum Chace but by the early 20th century there were other organizations in existence that also favored women suffrage. In 1907 the College Equal Suffrage League was formed, in 1909 Newport summer resident Alva Vanderbilt Belmont led the formation of the Political Equality League and across the state leagues were formed, mostly as auxiliaries of the National Woman Suffrage Association. In 1913 the Rhode Island Women’s Suffrage Party (RIWSP) was established and by 1915 the RIWSA, the College Equal Suffrage League and the RI Women’s Suffrage Party were all encompassed as The Rhode Island Equal Suffrage Association under the leadership of Mrs. Barton (Agnes) Jenks. 2 Adding to the proliferation of organizations Alice Paul and Lucy Burnes, two women greatly influenced by the more militant British woman suffrage movement, formed the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CU) in April 1913. Paul and Burns had been members of the NAWSA’s Congressional Committee, but they differed on strategy. The NAWSA had sought to achieve woman suffrage by focusing on individual state voting rights while the CU focused on a federal amendment. Two years later the CU would evolve into the National Woman’s Party. It was during this period of renewed effort to gain woman suffrage that Maria and Ingeborg first appear on the scene as suffragists. The earliest accounts of Maria’s and Ingeborg’s involvement in the suffrage movement can be found in the newspapers of the day. By 1914 accounts of meetings of the Woman’s Political Equality League of Providence appear with Ingeborg as the league’s president and Maria its secretary. During the warm summer months, it was proposed to hold meetings at Oakland Beach in Warwick, but the regular meetings were held at the Kindberg/Kindstedt residence at 557 Westminster Street in Providence. Meetings often had a speaker; on one occasion Ingeborg gave a talk titled ‘The Matrimonial System’ in which “she likened the matrimonial system to a fish net with the fish on the outside anxious to get in and the fish on the inside anxious to get out.” [2] Meetings of the league appear to have been weekly. During the meeting of March 25, 1915, the subject of the Dorr Rebellion having a possible bearing on what might be the ultimate methods resorted to by women to get the vote was introduced. It was decided to make the following week’s topic of discussion ‘Can the Women of Rhode Island in the Fight for the Vote Copy with Advantage the Method of the Dorr Rebellion’. [3] A Swedish language newspaper in September 1915 with reference to Ingeborg noted “She has for many years taken a lively interest in various reform projects in both social and religious areas, but at the moment she dedicates most of her attention to the women’s cause, since she believes that only through women’s participation in politics will she be able to make her voice heard in the legislative assemblies and point out the injustices and obtain those rectifications which can only be achieved by way of legislation and the implementation of which is necessary if we are to have a brighter future” [4] 3 Figure 2 – Ingeborg Kindstedt (center) selling the Woman’s Journal. When it was announced that the Congressional Union would hold a Women Voters Convention on September 14th, 15th and 16th at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco [5] both Maria and Ingeborg were committed to attend. [6] Maria sold her car and they purchased steamship tickets; in late summer they set off on a journey taking them through the recently opened Panama Canal on their way up the coast of California. [7] Little did they know at the time but what would soon unfold would catapult them into the center of one of the most iconic events of the woman’s suffrage movement and cause their names and their photos to appear on the front page of many newspapers across the country. [8] The Congressional Union, under the leadership of Alice Paul, had been for some time collecting names on a petition to present to the U.S. Congress and President Wilson. The petition had approximately 500,000 names and the intent was to take the petition from San Francisco to Washington D.C. in time for the opening of congress on December 6, 1915. Alva Belmont who was on the National Executive Committee of the CU and a Newport summer resident may have known of Maria and Ingeborg due to their suffrage efforts back in Rhode Island. Maria and Ingeborg had planned to purchase an automobile and drive back to Rhode Island. To a large degree it was fortuitous for all as to what would develop. Paul, always one to grasp the opportunity for publicity, thought if women envoys could drive the petition to Washington it would get good press coverage for the cause as well as provide the opportunity to collect more signatures on the petition, establish new branches for the Congressional Union, raise money for the cause and sell subscriptions to the CU’s newspaper, The Suffragist. Since Maria was willing to buy a new car (an Overland Six) and do the driving and Ingeborg was more than capable of performing the duties of mechanic, repairing engine problems and fixing flat tires, then Paul would provide two Western women envoys to join the journey and be the face of the CU, giving talks and meeting with the press as they pulled into towns along the way. Paul asked Sara Bard 4 Field, a poet and activist, and Frances Joliffe, a wealthy socialite, to represent the Congressional Union. Also assisting would be Mabel Vernon who would travel by train in advance of the envoys to make arrangements - most notably to ensure a crowd would be on hand to greet the travelers and see to it that there would be proper press coverage upon their arrival. Figure 3 - left to right, Maria Kindberg, Sara Bard Field, Mabel Vernon and Ingeborg Kinstedt in Washington, D.C. at the end of their journey. The cross-country, 3,000-mile, adventure set out from San Francisco on September 15th but at Sacramento, California Frances Joliffe had to drop out due to illness. [9] The trip would take ten weeks, cut across eighteen states and the District of Columbia and encounter all sorts of mechanical and navigational problems.

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